Instant Engineering Simulation: ANSYS Discovery Live

ANSYS has long held the vision that every engineer would be able to benefit from the insight of engineering simulation. It seems intuitive that you would want to build a digital model of your product and instantly see stresses, flows, temperature, etc. to gain insights into the design, as well as make changes in in real-time and see how they affect the performance.

Speed and Ease of Use Changes Everything

Simulation is ranked as one of the most critical engineering technologies in this age of the Internet of Things and additive manufacturing. However, half a century after its introduction it is still the domain of specialists and used predominantly for the most complex of engineering projects. Why? The learning curve is steep, sometimes requiring decades of experience, and it is after all rocket-science and can be both complex and time consuming to do simulations. All of this is about to change!

When technology crosses a threshold of usability and immediacy it becomes pervasive. From the printing press to the internet, capabilities that were once the domain of experts became widespread and profoundly changed human behavior. ANSYS believes in Pervasive Engineering SimulationTM – that tomorrows products demand that simulation be used by every engineer, for every product simple and complex, and across the entire product lifecycle. Today we are introducing the technology preview of ANSYS Discovery Live that enables a big part of this vision. It represents a breakthrough in the speed and ease-of-use of engineering simulation to put digital exploration in the hands of every engineer. Like the printing press and the smartphone it is an order of magnitude faster and easier to use than what was previously available.

Instead of taking days, months or weeks to setup, run and analyze digital prototypes with traditional engineering simulation solutions, Discovery Live allows for every engineer to immediately examine the impact of their design changes. Users can pose what-if questions upfront in the design process to rapidly explore thousands of design options and receive immediate feedback – allowing the user to digitally explore the impact of changes with results updating immediately.

Jacobs Analytics
"I was blown away by the speed and ease of use of Discovery. The time to complete an analysis is on the order of minutes as opposed to hours. You will be able to perform your first analysis in less than 15 minutes."
Travis Jacobs, Owner of Jacobs Analytics

Please don’t just take my word for it, but download the technology preview yourself and take it for a test drive. It is the best way to understand the difference. If you have done simulation before you will immediately appreciate this difference and if you have never done a simulation before you will be astounded that within 10-15 minutes you are up and running analyzing your design. It is really that simple.

Cornell University
"Educators can focus on teaching the concepts, demonstrating the physics in action and how to assess the results. Similarly students can get right to the physics and discover without having to become simulation experts first. This tool will allow true democratization of simulation." Prof. Rajesh Bhaskaran, Ph.D., Swanson Director of Engineering Simulation, Cornell University

The engineers of tomorrow will take this for granted. Like my children who take the smartphone for granted and have never experienced a world without an always-on broadband connection and a super computer in their pocket, the next generation of engineers will expect to do design changes in real-time and instantly see the impact of those changes. That we believe is the power of Discovery Live.

This will not diminish the role of the simulation expert. Detailed validation and complex analysis will always demand the highest expertise and the deepest most accurate simulation tools. The smartphone has enabled broad adoption of “supercomputing” for all of us, but there are still as many, if not more, high-end experts working at Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook developing next generation cloud computing platforms and machine learning algorithms. The same will be true for engineering simulation fueled by the incredible opportunity and complexity of self-driving cars, rockets to mars, and sub 7nm semiconductors.

For this reason we have also designed Discovery Live to work with our flagship product. So the design engineer can collaborate with the analyst to analyze the designs even further where needed. Or so the analyst themselves can do rapid exploration before setting up a more comprehensive and detailed validation study.

Cummins"When I first saw Discovery Live I was very intrigued. I believe it could be a game changer, and greatly help in democratization of modeling and simulation. It has the potential for our specialists and designers to do “what if” studies much, much faster and easier."
Bob Tickel, Director of Structural & Dynamic Analysis, Corporate R&T, Cummins

We are in the early phases and there is a lot of expansion opportunities for this new technologies, but we are excited about the potential. We hope you will take it for a spin and add your feedback and impressions to the forum. The ANSYS Discovery journey is only just beginning!